As you may have seen, David's been taking care of OSNews for a few days because I'm quite busy with work. Still, there's one thing I'd like to talk about: the desktop mode in Windows 8. I wish I could've added this to the first impressions article, but I only arrived at this conclusion yesterday: desktop mode in Windows 8 is Microsoft's equivalent of Mac OS X's Classic mode.

"In OS X there was a path forward for existing source code to be migrated to the new environment. In Metro, the input devices are different, the APIs are different, the environment is different. Existing source code would be much harder to migrate.

I am not a desktop developer, but I use ASP.NET and PHP on IIS ... Thanks though for clearing that up.

I think this makes my point nicely.

IIS isn't able to run in Metro. It can't - the environment is different, and IIS doesn't want to find itself killed or suspended randomly. The class of applications you're writing are permanently scoped to the non-Metro world, with no path into it.

So let's hope the "legacy" desktop isn't pure legacy, lest this (and all other server-side code) wouldn't be feasible to run on Windows. This is very different to OS 9 -> OS X where server code could be migrated, and native server code worked much better on OS X than it ever did on OS 9 due to the improved platform functionality. In time OS 9 could be removed wholesale. That's just not what's happening here.